The X-Men #41

Desperate to find a way to outdo his own inanity with Frankenstein's Monster, Roy Thomas follows up with a tribute to an age when comics were not very good, drawn by Dick Ayers, whose drawings are also sub-mediocre. Grotesk wanders the metro lines and suddenly remembers he is the sole surviving prince of an under-ground race who ruled the caverns for millennia, only to be wiped out by tremors from an underground radiation explosion done by the US, which wiped out millions of miles of underground caverns. I'd like to say that was a set-up to a joke, but unfortunately it's the background Thomas gives to the latest villain-o-the-month. Yes, indeed, Grotesk is walking along and suddenly remembers all of that, vowing revenge against mankind, the makers of tremors and machines. It's just thoroughly awful. Somehow, though, Thomas salvages the issue to an extent with a growing intriguing supporting story with the characters: Jean and Xavier are growing distant from the others, causing all sorts of suspicions, working on something so secret not even the audience can know what it is yet. During the X-Men's training, Xavier demands precision and an end to the badinage - it's about time, really, that he was concerned about the strength of the team as a unit. Cyclops picks up on this and insists on it when they encounter Grotesk in the last panel, but who knows if the team (inexplicably consisting only of Beast; we have no idea why Iceman and Angel aren't there) will remember, especially since they have the newfound abilities to squeeze three of them through a door-sized panel in the rock, as shown incredulously on page 12. I suppose we should expect such illogicality from an issue containing an advertisement for the latest Mothers of Invention album (what was that, Stan Lee, about keeping your mags clean and family-oriented?). Adding to the obfuscation is the Board of Trustees of Archer College: demanding that their research scientists stop doing research, then confiscate their machines when they prove successful. "I'll prove to you that even a college Board of Trustees can be mistaken!" says Dr. Hunt, inventor of the earthquake machine designed to benefit humanity (since we all know how beneficial earthquakes are to humanity). Looking at the state of education in the United States today, Archer College's BoT seems to have been the model: "let's say and do stupid things completely contrary to the nature of true education, to the detriment of our constituency, the nation, and existence itself." Meanwhile, Grotesk and his Conan-outfit, coupled with his sub-Mjolnir (see page 11), takes a hostage to his underground lair for no particular reason, simply so the X-Men can miraculously find him without even trying. It's all rather confusing, though the character moments once again save the issue from a total disaster. The continuing saga of the origin of the X-Men plods on into further realms of mundane ineffectiveness. Xavier has enough mental ability to save himself from tons of concrete, but not enough to overpower a low-level villain who became a mutant yesterday. Fitting, I suppose, for the issue. Finally Jack O'Diamonds becomes a fully human diamond, which seems like an odd desire for a person to have, and Scott and Xavier finally meet, with Scott sensing immediately he can trust Xavier. Not the most auspicious of beginnings, but I can appreciate Thomas was trying to foster a sense of excitement in this origin story.